Shaped sheets are applied to some absorbent articles, such as sanitary napkins, panty liners, and disposable diapers. For example, as a topsheet, there has been disclosed one in which heat embossing is performed on the surface of a sheet-like hydrophilically treated conjugate fiber non-woven fabric to form protrusions and recesses thereon, and in which the tip surface portions of the protrusions are formed into films, thus providing truncated-cone-shaped protrusions (see Patent Document 1). In this topsheet, the protrusions are independent from one another, and the tip portions of the protrusions are formed into films, resulting in a very high fiber density.
Further, it has been disclosed to join two non-woven sheets together with a plurality of intermittently provided pin embosses, and selectively contract the lower sheet by heat drying to separate the upper sheet in a corrugated fashion, thereby to prepare a top sheet (see Patent Document 2). Further, there has been disclosed an absorbent article which is equipped with a liquid permeable surface sheet, a liquid impermeable back sheet, and a liquid retaining absorbent member provided between the two sheets, and whose surface to be brought into contact with the skin has a bumpy (asperity) region in which a plurality of protrusions are formed in a regular fashion. Further, this absorbent article has a non-bumpy region in which protrusions lower than those of the bumpy region are formed or in which no protrusions are formed (see Patent Document 3). In this absorbent article, the bumpy region is formed by a laminate sheet in which a first layer arranged on the skin side and a second layer on the absorbent member side are stacked, thereby to form a joint portion partially bonding the two layers in a predetermined pattern at the joint portion. Further, the plurality of protrusions in the bumpy region are formed through deformation of the portion of the first layer other than the joint portion into a convex configuration through contraction of the second layer. In the topsheets of Patent Document 2 and Patent Document 3, the protrusions and recesses of the upper layer are formed through contraction of the lower layer, so the fiber density of the upper layer is uniform.
Apart from this, there has been disclosed a topsheet including an upper sheet and a lower sheet and having hollow protrusions, with the bottom portions of the protrusions being rectangular and the protrusions as a whole being formed as rectangular parallelepipeds or truncated tetragonal pyramids (see Patent Document 4).    [Patent Document 1] JP-A-11-347062 (“JP-A” means unexamined published Japanese patent application)    [Patent Document 2] JP-A-2002-165830    [Patent Document 3] JP-A-2003-275239    [Patent Document 4] JP-A-2004-174234